Analyzing Palladium

apeir0 writes "The Register has a story which proposes an ulterior motive to Microsoft's new Palladium: a GPL-killer. 'It's the very fact that this appears insoluble to me that helps me realize that MS has put tremendous, careful thought into it. To make the commons Linux-hostile, MS is taking dramatic steps to make it GPL-hostile. Very clever and admirably diabolical.' Is this a valid point or just paranoia?" Ross Anderson has been writing about this recently; we covered his paper a few days ago, and he's now got a Palladium FAQ up. Another submitter sent in this interview with the Microsoft manager in charge of Palladium. The Washington Post has a column. Update: 06/27 22:43 GMT by T : Bob Cringely also has a column on Palladium up, in which he says that several of his fears have been realized by it.

Ignore them.

[IQ]

Our business runs Linux. We have depricated M$ and their products. We are fast. Our expenses went down hugely. Our services are reliable. We buy the best commodity components and build all our own machines. Life is good.

Damn Him

[Niksie3]

9. Why call the monitor chip a `Fritz' chip?

In honour of Senator Fritz Hollings of North Carolina, who is working tirelessly in Congress to make TCPA a mandatory part of all consumer electronics.

Re:Between a valid point and paranoia

[ILikeRed]

But considering Microsoft, this could be an attack on many things, it's just a great bonus that they can use it as an attack on the GPL.

Check out this Yahoo! story [yahoo.com] for another angle. I imagine Bill is think "check and mate"....

How are Microsoft experts?

[alexhmit01]

They have failed, miserably, in the PVR market. They have failed, miserably, in the game console market... twice (WinCE in the Dreamcast, Xbox). They have failed, miserably, in the personal accounting market (Intuit has repeatedly cleaned their clocks). Their entrance into the handheld market has been anything BUT a runaway success, though they leveraged confusion at Palm to grab a nice chunk of the market.

They have 4 major successes. They took the OS monopoly granted them by IBM (as a result of IBM facing an antitrust suit) and built a successful empire. They leveraged internal knowledge of "Chicago," (Windows 4.0/95) to get Office 95 on release and establish a near monopoly on desktop office suites. They leveraged their OS and finances to establish a near monopoly of Internet web browsers. They also used financial muscle to clip Borland off at the knees and establish a near monopoly in development software.

However, in the cases of their successes, they really leveraged a critical mistake by their competition. Even NT Server's rise was a combination of marketing and boneheaded moves by Novell. Novell has let everyone believe that they are dead, so NT ate a lot of their market. Linux is now a huge portion of the market.

I really don't understand why everyone believes that Microsoft is invincible. Look at how WordPerfect, Netscape, and Novell dropped the ball. Also look at how Apple dropped the ball.

Microsoft is great at release early and release often. They put out near beta code quickly to establish a beachhead. They then keep running at you, hard. Fail to innovate (Netscape and Real) and they will clobber you. Keep running ahead, and you can be the Intuit of the world.

Microsoft has a LOT of failures. MS SQL Server has NOT defeated Oracle and DB2 for the Enterprise "mass" market of databases. MS SQL Server gets most of its success from MS Shops that web deploy apps with VBScript ASPs. Low end web publishing uses MySQL+PHP, while the higher end does Java+JSP+Oracle. Those of us in the technically complex world without the heavy Enterprise backing do either PHP (or Perl) with PostgreSQL in the Unix camp OR ASP with MS SQL in the NT camp.

MSN has never defeated AOL, despite its early predictions (and 7 years of being pushed in MS's monopoly Oses). You're insane if you think that Xbox is competitive with the PS2 or Game Boy Advanced. It has been running even with Nintendo's Gamecube in 1 of the 3 major markets (trounced in two others) while Nintendo hasn't released a major title yet.

UltimateTV was a total flop. There are lots of failures, not just Microsoft Bob.

Get a grip people,
Alex

Re:Lots of problems ahead for MS

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Remind me, where do I download the software hack for Xbox?

The X Box Hacker Site [xboxhacker.com], of course. Really, I don't follow X Box hacking closely enough to know how far this has progressed, but it seems to me that a mod chip has been developed--in 9 months since the X Box was released, and it's DRM was touted as 'unbreakable'. Give it another 9 months for more development.

In fairness, though, the link to the FAQ indicated that while external-to-the-processor DRM management solutions were feasible to break, the embedded-in-the-processor DRM solutions expected in rev 2 and later of Palladium would be not hackable by individuals, or even groups of individuals.

And as for your other point: This is a big deal. It's the Son of SSSCA--yes it is. This is a big deal--the death of Linux, and the end of Apple, unless Motorola gets on board, and quick. You may be able to run those OSes, but you will have ZERO interoperability with 95% of the market. Two things that I think might save us: public outcry against this like Intel's previous attempt to allow external reading of the processor's serial number. Also, since this plan really requires ubiquity of the OS, the absence of a monopoly OS will hamper or kill it. The Anti-Trust penalty may help here, or may not.

Re:Olympus SmartMedia

[SkeptiNerd75]

The Olympus cards are special, all right. In price, that is, but not in technology. If you overwrite the header on generic smartmedia with an Olympus header, your camera will enable the panoramic feature. See this page [geocities.com], for example.

Re:Between a valid point and paranoia

[mark-t]

This, I think, is a good point. The GPL had been around for how many years before Microsoft started its anti-GPL campaign? I remember working with GPL'd stuff back in 1989, a few years before the name Linux had even first been mentioned. Microsoft was already well-entrenched at this time, and I was playing with GPL'd software in DOS in thos days, why didn't they see it as a threat then? It wasn't until Linux actually entered the fray of being a serious operating system that MS sat up and took notice. Yep. I think it's more about Linux than the GPL -- the GPL just happens to stand in their way of being able to control Linux, so they attack it that way.

Re:Olympus SmartMedia

[Ben Hutchings]

Since that site's over-quota, try Google's cached copy [google.com] instead.